Leaderboard

I had this conversation recently with another member here, and I'll tell you what I told them, right, wrong or indifferent. You are not part of the team. You are the leader of the team. You are not another cog in the wheel, you are the main gear. You can laugh and joke and have fun with the team, but in the end, this is YOUR call. You have chosen to step up to the plate and become a medic, you no longer have the right to share responsibility for your patients care. Your call, your patient, your team to use, including their knowledge when necessary, to solve problems, but not yours to shirk your responsibility off onto. I sucked at this when I first started. I often thought, "Bob has been doing this forever, this patient is in the toilet, I should ask him what's wrong, treat accordingly, and spend the time to learn on another patient that isn't so sick." Stupid, right? But that was my limp dick idea of patient advocacy. To let whoever seemed smartest of most experienced make decision while I was learning. How convenient that I was always the least smart and least experienced so I didn't ever really have to take responsibility. Also, it turned out that my logic was pretty friggin' good most times. There have been many threads here about the patients that we regret, the ones that haunt us. You know what? I don't have any dead patients that haunt me, but there are several from early on when I chose to take the advice of someone else when I was confident that I knew what was going on, and turned out retarding the patients condition instead of improving it..just like I believed that it would. I cringe when I think of walking into the hospital with my patient in much worse condition than necessary and having the nurses/doc ask..."Why did you do X instead of Y??" And the only honest answer I could have given, had I chose to be honest, was, "Because I'm a pussy and I didn't want to be responsible for making my own decisions." I used to try and figure out what I thought was wrong, decide what I thought I should do, compare that to what I believed that smart people around me would do, what the protocols said, what the doc was going to say when I got to the ER, what the jury might say should I be wrong...and finally thought, "Fuck this....I'm not smart enough to run all of those angles. I can only do my best if I commit both brain cells to a working diagnosis and logical treatment plan according to ME." And you know what man? People WILL speak up if they think that you're making a mistake. They really will. Often you will have to choose to continue on your path instead of take their advice, but they can respect that too. And they will keep quiet and jump right up on your band wagon to help the instant that they see that you are confident enough to follow. And you know what else? When you show the backbone to lead, people will actually be supportive, even when you're wrong. Because only a coward that does/tries nothing is going to succeed all the time. You can't have confidence in your decisions until you actually begin to make your own decisions. Until then you will continue to just make yourself scared. Leading seems scary from the outside looking in, but it's really just a paper dragon. Next call, fuck all what anyone thinks and lead. Use those Jr to you and Sr to you in any way that makes sense to you and, judging from your posts, I'm CERTAIN that you will find that you've been running from shadows. I guarantee you, and I rarely feel confident speaking for this amazing group of people, that one thing everyone here is certain of, is that you WILL choose to lead. You can do it today, or you can live through weeks of humiliation first, but it's going to happen. What are you waiting for? Dwayne

Dwayne said it perfectly. Ill tell you that as a new medic there is a lot going on. Hiding in your shell isn't the best thing. You may be out of your comfort zone but you just have to do it. Its been hard for me to do but it helps to just step up to the plate and bat rather than just stand there hoping for a "ball".

LOL Ash...I guess my tough love talk worked. In a perfect world, every patient will be a stay and play type, giving you time to think about what your going to do and then do it. No pressure, no stress. However, in the real world, we often do not have that kind of time. Now is the time to find your feet, your way of doing things. Hone your critical thinking, decide on your treatment plan and then...just do it. There will come a time, when you won't have a safety net and right or wrong, you will be responsible for your actions. Be prepared to stand by your decisions and defend them if necessary. Its that first big step that hangs ALL of us up. We all have gone through this and survived it. You will too. Take the plunge...you won't regret it and you will be amazed

While I don't recall the participants in the conversation, a leader in an early 1960s Advancement group for blacks was told that he and the group should "Pull themselves up by their boot-straps". The black leader countered by sending a telegram (way before E-Mail and IMs existed), saying, "OK, we'll pull ourselves up by our boot-straps. Please send boot-straps!" As for me, a white dude, being a 3rd generation American Born Jew of German, Russian and Polish background, the only one who qualifies to tell me to go back to where I came from is an ex girlfriend, who happens to be Navajo!

Why not sign up for a paramedic refresher course put on by a university or community college. Do your homework and don't fall for a course run by some yahoo but ask around and find a course that actually makes you think. You can sign up for the online versions but I'm pretty sure that you will get regurgiations of what you already know. I'll bet there are many refreshers put on by quality instructors who don't make you recite random facts and EMS info, but make you really think and put what you know and what you are learning into real practice ONe such instructor is Bob Page and another such instructor would be of the caliber of Mike Smith or Dr. Bledsoe if they do refreshers. Prolly not but you get my thought process here right? One question to ask yourself, would you go back to your school and take a refresher with them? If the answer is a resounding NO then you need a new direction and a new school to learn from. Books are one thing but seriously, a back to the basics class might just be what you need.